Letter #13, 2024, Friday, May 17: Apparitions
Cardinal Victor Fernandez, 62, today presented a new Vatican document on how apparitions and visions — like the apparitions of La Salette, Fatima and Lourdes — should be studied and evaluated by the Church.
Point 1: The essential point of this reformed procedure seems to be that the Church will no longer publicly affirm that any phenomenon of this type is of "supernatural" origin.
In the past, the Church would study a phenomenon and say either that it was:
— not of supernatural origin, or
— that it could not be determined whether or not it was of supernatural origin, or
— that it was of supernatural origin, and so, worthy of belief
Still, even if the Church sometimes did judge that there was something "supernatural" about an apparition, no such phenomenon has ever been proposed to the faithful as a point of faith they are required to believe.
Now, under the new rules, the highest level of approval that will be granted to any such phenomenon is "nihil obstat," that there is "nothing standing in the way," or "nothing blocking" or "nothing impeding" belief in the vision or apparition as an authentic encounter with Christ, with the Holy Spirit, or with the Virgin Mary, or with some other saint or prophet from Church history or from salvation history.
The Church will not say "this apparition is of supernatural origin" but rather "there is nothing standing in the way" of believing that the apparition or vision has a supernatural origin, and so, may be — may be — taken as an authentic and holy spiritual message to be taken into account by all the faithful.
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Point 2: The second point is that the authority of the Holy See, procedurally, is strengthened, and the authority of the local bishop weakened.
Under the new rules, the Holy See will always be involved in whatever study and evaluation is made bu any such spiritual phenomena.
Thus, Rome will henceforth have an even tighter control over approving or disapproving of popular devotion developing around such phenomena.
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Point 3: Third, a curious point.
In his introduction to the new procedures at today's press conference, Fernandez mentioned, as a negative example to be avoided, the thought and writing of the French theologian, Pasquier Quesnel (1634-1719).
Who?
Pasquier Quesnel — a brilliant theologian from more than 300 years ago who strongly supported the thought of Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), after whom the Jansenist heresy took its name.
Jansen was a great critic of the Jesuits, for their alleged moral laxity.
And Jansen's thought was condemned by the Church as heretical.
What did it mean that Fernandez spoke about Quesnel at today's press conference?
What's it all about?
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The fight against "Jansenism" as a key to this pontificate
Well, for some time, a number of Catholic observers of this pontificate have said that a key to the pontificate of Pope Francis is to realize that he is persuaded that there is among the traditionalist Catholics a spirit reminiscent of... Jansenism.(!)
A representative article on this topic appeared on August 22, 2014, almost 10 years ago now, written by Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter. (link, and see link)
Winters was reacting to an article by Damian Thompson of The Spectator in which Thompson had argued that Francis was ignorant of the situation of the Catholic Church in the English-speaking world, blinded by his Latin American experience.
Thompson had written: "'The Pope is hungry to spread the Gospel and in Latin America he sees that being done most effectively by left-wing priests in the slums,' says a Vatican insider. ‘What he doesn’t realise is that in North America and other English-speaking countries, it’s the conservatives who have fire in their bellies, who evangelise, often with minimal encouragement from their bishops.’ And no one is likely to explain it to him."
And Winters responded, bringing in a reference to Jansenism:
"It is surely the case that there is a kind of conservative Catholic in the English-speaking world with fire in the belly. But, here is where Thompson’s analytical skills fail him. Having identified the Pope’s being a Jesuit as a key to understanding the man, Thompson fails to see that the Holy Father, above all, is engaged in an old struggle for the Society of Jesus: He is confronting the Jansenists of our day (emphasis added), the very same conservative Catholics in the English-speaking world whom Thompson thinks have the fire of the Gospel in their bellies. It is not the Gospel, but a hyper-moralistic concern against spiritual contagion that animates the conservatives Thompson champions. And, quite clearly, this is not what animates Pope Francis."
And the fact that Fernandez today publicly cited Quesnel, one of Jansen's strongest colleagues and supporters, as someone who — like certain modern visionaries(!) — "narrowed the Gospel down" (in Fernandez' words) to a rather "rigorist" and "faith and prayer-centered" (as opposed to charitable action-centered) spiritual life, seems to give us a glimpse into the mental world of both Francis and Fernandez.
We may imagine Fernandez and Francis talking, in a recent conversation in the Vatican, about the possible dangers of seers and visionaries who inspire people to renew an intensive life of prayer, but not so much to work on behalf of the poor, as a recrudescence of... Jansenism.
Hence — one might argue — Fernandez' mention today of Quesnel.
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What did the Jansenists believe?
According to the custom adopted by the humanists of the Renaissance, Cornelius Jansen Latinized his name to Cornelius Jansenius. His teacher, Jacques Janson, taught the doctrine of the theologian Michael Baius (Michel de Bay), who had died at Leuven in 1589.
According to the latter, humans are affected from birth by the sin of Adam.
Human instincts lead necessarily to evil.
An individual can be saved only by the grace of Christ, accorded to a small number of the elect who have been chosen in advance and destined to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
This doctrine, inspired by certain writings of St. Augustine, attracted Jansen and another student who had come to study at Leuven, a Frenchman named Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, who was to become a leader of the Jansenist movement. The two young men became friends in Paris, where Jansen went in 1604. They decided to revive theology, which they believed the theologians of the Sorbonne had reduced to subtle and vain discussions among Scholastics. Jansen and Duvergier thought that it was necessary to render to God the homage owed by humanity and that the pride of the Renaissance savants had alienated Christians from the Jesus who loved the simple and the humble.
Quesnel was a brilliant French priest and spiritual writer from a prominent French noble family. In 1657, he joined the French Oratory, a religious society of secular priests, and was ordained in 1659.
However, his Jansenist sympathies led to his banishment from Paris in 1681, and three years later he was expelled from the Oratory for refusing to accept its anti-Jansenist decrees.
Quesnel's essential outlook may he summarized in the thesis of "the double contrary love."
Quesnel wrote (and in what follows I have added the italics for emphasis):
"There are only two loves, from which all our volitions and all our actions spring: the love of God (charity properly so called) which refers everything to God and which God rewards; and the love of self and of the world, which is evil as it does not refer to God what should be referred to Him" (prop. 44).
Quesnel believed that all repentance which does not arise from pure charity was useless, for "fear restrains only the hands; the heart remains attached to sin, as long as it is not led by the love of justice" (prop. 61); and "he who refrains from evil only through fear of punishment has already sinned in his heart" (prop. 62).
In other words, there was a "totalizing" aspect to Quesnel's thought which diminished to insignificance the sincere but inevitably imperfect attempts of men and women to move toward holiness, saying that only God's grace could accomplish what our fallenness could not begin to achieve.
This led in some to a sense of fatality and despair in the search for the moral perfection of holiness.
In his 2014 article, Winters wrote: "The Jansenists of our day, like their predecessors, and like the Donatists before them, see the essence of Christian life in preserving their own moral purity. It is easy to see how this concern can lead to a spiritual pride — 'I thank thee God that I am not like other men' — and has proven ill-suited to attracting converts to the faith. Of course, every Christian should be concerned about their spiritual purity, but the essence of the Gospel lies elsewhere.(!?!)
On September 14, 2014, Joseph Shaw, head of the Latin Mass society in England, responded to Winters (link):
"The Jansenists were an 18th century group of Catholics, eventually condemned by the Pope, and who eventually formed a schismatic Church in the Netherlands, characterised by a kind of crypto-Calvinism. This manifested itself in the rejection of free will and the notion of cooperation with grace, on which subject they quickly became locked in a ferocious pamphlet war with the Jesuits. The Jansenists included some brilliant polemicists, notably recruiting Blaise Pascal to their cause. The notion of unscrupulous Jesuits working out how to avoid the moral law owes more to these guys than to English or German Protestant polemicists of the 16th and 17th century.
"The attack on Jesuit 'laxism,' which fitted in so well with earlier critiques of Catholic laxity by Protestants, was only part of their schtick, however. Their biggest effect on the Church has been their attack on popular devotions and the liturgical tradition. In this they were taken up by Enlightenment rulers in various places, notably the Habsburg Grand Duke of Tuscany who called the (false) Synod of Pistoia. This called for a radically simplified liturgy, said aloud, in the vernacular. Other Jansenists wanted to increase the amount of dialogue in the liturgy, getting the people to respond 'Amen' at the end of each prayer of the Canon."
In other words, for Shaw, the Jansenists had nothing in common with the modern Catholics who wish to hold fast to the old Mass and the tradition of the Church.
In 1712 in Rome, the Holy Office of the Inquisition began to prepare a papal bull to condemn the Jansenists. The result was the famous Bull Unigenitus Dei Filius at Rome on September 8, 1713. (What follows is drawn from a Catholic Encyclopedia article on Unigenitus, link.)
"The Bull begins with the warning of Christ against false prophets, especially such as 'secretly spread evil doctrines under the guise of piety and introduce ruinous sects under the image of sanctity'; then it proceeds to the condemnation of 101 propositions which are taken verbatim from the last edition of Quesnel's chief work. The propositions are condemned respectively as 'False, captious, ill-sounding, offensive to pious ears, scandalous, pernicious, rash, injurious to the Church and its practices, contumelious to Church and State, seditious, impious, blasphemous, suspected and savouring of heresy, favouring heretics, heresy, and schism, erroneous, bordering on heresy, often condemned, heretical, and reviving various heresies, especially those contained in the famous propositions of Jansenius.'
"The first 43 propositions repeat the errors of Baius and Jansenius on grace and predestination, such as: grace works with omnipotence and is irresistible; without grace man can only commit sin; Christ died for the elect only... The last 30 propositions (72-101) deal with the Church, its discipline, and the sacraments: the Church comprises only the just and the elect; the reading of the Bible is binding on all; sacramental absolution should be postponed till after satisfaction; the chief pastors can exercise the Church's power of excommunication only with the consent, at least presumed, of the whole body of the Church; unjust excommunication does not exclude the excommunicated from union with the Church. (link)
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Summing up
Fernandez today at the press conference said that Quesnal had distorted the content of the Gospel teaching on salvation, limiting it to "faith and prayer," adding that Jesus in the Gospels and Paul in his Epistles taught that Christian faith was characterized, not by the "religious" activity of "faith and prayer" but by "love of God and of one's neighbor."
Fernandez suggested that many apparitions and visions seem to lead people to view their faith as something to cling to, in prayer, and to de-emphasize the need to "love one's neighbor."
Just as Quesnel needed to be corrected, so bishops [today] must be vigilant to correct the alleged messages received in apparitions and visions, Fernandez said.
This gives a certain context to the reason this reform was made now, at this moment in this pontificate.
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